Oracle Bones (3 page)

THE WHOLE WORLD AS ONE COMMUNITY
SERVE THE PEOPLE
BE PRACTICAL AND REALISTIC

That was the trajectory of twentieth-century idealism, compressed into thirteen characters. The modern artifacts often worked like that; they simplified the chaos of the past. At one Nanjing museum, I bought a poster labeled
OUTLINE OF ANCIENT CHINESE HISTORY
. The poster featured a timeline twisted into the shape of a spiral. Everything started in the center, at a tiny point identified as “Yuanmou Ape-man.” After Yuanmou Ape-man (approximately 1.7 million years ago), the timeline passed through Peking Man and then made an abrupt turn. By the Xia dynasty, the spiral had completed one full circle. The Shang and the Zhou dynasties wrapped up a second revolution. The spiral got bigger with each turn, as if picking up speed. Whenever something ended—a dynasty, a warring state—the spiral was marked with a line and a black
X
, and then something new took its place. There weren’t any branches or dead ends. From Yuanmou Ape-man, it took three turns of the spiral to reach the revolution of 1911, where the timeline finally broke the cycle, straightened out, and pointed directly up and off the page.

THAT EVENING,
I was eating dinner with a friend when we heard a sudden roar from the street outside. By the time we settled the bill, the protestors had already swept past. From a block away their voices echoed into the night.

A group of foreigners stood on the sidewalk, looking stunned—major street protests were unheard of in a city like Nanjing. One of the foreigners told me that late last night the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. NATO claimed that the bombing had been
an accident, but some Chinese had died in the attack. The news had just been broadcast in China.

In the wake of the protestors, the street was empty—no cars, no bikes. I ran after the crowd, figuring that I should check out the scene and then telephone the bureau. As I drew closer, the chanting voices became clear:

“DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM!”
“DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM!”

I jogged along the side of the street, moving past uneven lines of protestors. There must have been thousands; they held signs and Chinese flags, and after chanting the slogans they sang the national anthem. Suddenly the crowd broke into a run, and then slowed again at the intersection called Xinjiekou, where a statue of Sun Yat-sen stood on a pedestal at the heart of a traffic circle.

I slipped into the marching crowd, hoping to watch for a while and then interview somebody. For a moment, the young people stared at me, but then their attention returned to the marching and the chanting. A single student called out a phrase, and then the rest echoed:

“DOWN WITH NATO!”
“DOWN WITH NATO!”

It reminded me of the Chinese students I had taught a year earlier—the way they memorized lessons by reciting in unison during study time before class. And these marchers also looked like my former students: mostly skinny men in glasses and button-down shirts.

“GO FORWARD, GO FORWARD!”
“GO FORWARD, GO FORWARD!”

We made a turn, then another, and I was lost; these nighttime streets all looked the same. Once more, the crowd broke into a run, and I figured that we must be nearing some destination. But a moment later we slowed again. After a couple more turns, I finally recognized a landmark: the Sun Yat-sen statue. We had doubled back to Xinjiekou.

I chose a student on my left—a friendly face, sweating beneath wire-rimmed glasses—and asked where we were going. He gestured ahead vaguely and then turned to me.

“Where are you from?”

I told him that I was an American journalist.

“DOWN WITH NATO!”
“DOWN WITH NATO!”

“What’s your opinion about what happened in Belgrade?” the student asked.

“I don’t know anything about it,” I said. “I’m just here to report on the protests.”

“DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM!”
“DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM!”

“Your government needs to stop the war in Yugoslavia,” the student said. “Why does America have to be the world police?”

I stammered and shrugged apologetically; I hadn’t expected to be talking about Yugoslavia in Nanjing. In March, NATO had started a bombing campaign in support of Albanian Muslims who had been attacked after pushing for greater autonomy in the province of Kosovo. Even before the Chinese embassy had been bombed, the government-controlled media had adamantly opposed the NATO campaign, defending President Slobodan Milosevic as a victim of “American hegemony.” The Chinese seemed concerned mostly about how the Yugoslavia issue might affect independence movements in Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang, a region in the far west.

As we marched, students came over to me, one by one. In the beginning, they were polite—invariably they told me that it wasn’t personal; they didn’t blame me for being American. Often they were curious about my reaction, but mostly they wanted to express their opinions. They knew that the attack had been intentional; there had been three bombs; they had come from three different directions. I had no idea of the source of this information, but everybody said the same thing. Three bombs, three directions. It couldn’t have been accidental. American technology was the most advanced in the world and it was impossible to make mistakes like that.

“DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM!”
“DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM!”

One young man introduced himself as Wu Ming, an undergraduate at the Aeronautics University in Nanjing. The name might have been fake; many of the students refused to give their identities, and Wu Ming is a common pseudonym in the Chinese press (it sounds the same as “nameless”). But this student looked earnest and he asked if he could express his feelings in writing. Happily,
I handed him my pen and paper; I was growing dizzy from trying to take notes amid all the shouting and marching.

It was a warm spring night; the weather had not yet turned hot but the trees were already full, arching over the streets. Nanjing still has an ancient city wall, and occasionally I caught a glimpse of the structure, looming dark against the sky. Everywhere, people lined the sidewalks. Cops stood at intersections, watching the protestors, who had settled into certain rhythms. The steady chanting: one voice, a beat, the voice of the crowd; one voice, a beat, the voice of the crowd. We marched, and then we broke into a run, and then we marched again. Wu Ming stopped writing whenever the pace picked up. At one point, a new chant emerged:

“BU CHI KENDEJI!”
“BU CHI KENDEJI!”

I wasn’t sure that I heard correctly, and I asked Wu Ming what they were shouting. “Don’t Eat Kentucky,” he said. We slowed in front of a KFC franchise—in Chinese, the name is simply “Kentucky”—and then the crowd surged again. Soon I caught a glimpse of the gates of Nanjing University, followed by the golden arches.

“BU CHI MAIDANGLAO!”
“DON’T EAT MCDONALD’S!”

It wasn’t until later that I realized the protests were happening all across China—the most violent anti-American demonstrations since the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. In Beijing, the Communist Youth League had bused groups of university students into the embassy district, where they marched past the American and British compounds. The national television news ran footage of the Beijing demonstrations, and students across the country quickly organized. In Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, protestors set fire to the home of the American consul-general. Using an iron bicycle rack as a battering ram, they attempted to break the bulletproof front door of the consulate. In Beijing, students pelted the American and British embassies with rocks and bricks and paint bombs. The vandalism spilled over to a few other embassies, including the Albanian compound. Apparently the protestors were angry because the Albanians were the ethnic group whose plight had inspired the NATO campaign.

But Nanjing’s days as a political center were long gone, and the city had no foreign embassies or consulates. For hours, our crowd circled the downtown district, searching for targets. Sometimes we marched; sometimes we ran;
sometimes we stopped to shout at the yellow arches. Wu Ming returned my notes, and I put them in my pocket; there wasn’t any point in writing when the same thing kept happening over and over. A turn, a brief sprint, another turn: the Sun Yat-sen statue. Another student at my elbow: American technology, three bombs, three directions. Down with America, Down with NATO. Three directions, three bombs. Don’t Eat Kentucky, Don’t Eat Kentucky. We marched, we ran. Sun Yat-sen again.

THE ANGER DEEPENED
as the evening wore on. Conversations became shorter, more staccato; fewer people asked for my opinion. Finally I stepped out of the crowd and watched from the sidewalk.

“DON’T EAT KENTUCKY!”
“DON’T EAT KENTUCKY!”

Around midnight, a group of protestors smashed the windows of a KFC. By the time I got there, police had cordoned off the restaurant—lights off, windows gaping. Bystanders told me that the cops had dispersed the attackers by explaining that the restaurant was actually Chinese-owned.

“DON’T EAT MCDONALD’S!”
“DON’T EAT MCDONALD’S!”

Another mob attacked a statue of Ronald McDonald that was sitting quietly on a bench in front of a franchise near Nanjing University. The following morning, I talked to a McDonald’s employee, who told me that the crowd had used sticks and poles to destroy
Maidanglao Shushu
. The Chinese name translates directly as “Uncle McDonald.” The worker looked nervous; she said that the restaurant would be closed that night, in case there was more violence. Outside, a single jagged piece of bright yellow fiberglass was still stuck to the bench—the final remains of Uncle McDonald’s butt.

“DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM!”

Later that week, when I asked the Chinese assistant at the
Wall Street Journal
to help me read the comments that Wu Ming had scrawled in my notes, she couldn’t decipher a single complete sentence.

BY THE SECOND
day of protests, it was no longer necessary to ask people any questions. If I stood on the sidewalk, they confronted me, and exchanges always started the same way: “What country are you from?” Usually, the lectures didn’t end until I finally shrugged and walked away. For me, the excite
ment of the first evening had worn off; there was a difference between chasing information and having it chase you down. I wanted to tell people that I was only a clipper—I wasn’t a real journalist, and I couldn’t publish all the angry things that Chinese people said to me.

Overnight, red national flags had sprouted above restaurants and shops, and groups of student protestors marched through Nanjing all day long. Television coverage was nonstop: images of the ruined embassy in Belgrade, photographs of the three Chinese journalists who had died. The state media described the attacks as intentional, the work of “the American-led NATO.” NATO and the United States had issued statements claiming that the bombing had been accidental, but they hadn’t been broadcast on the Chinese news. It was unclear how the government planned to respond to the attack.

In the afternoon, hoping for a distraction, I tried to continue research on my article about history. I visited the Memorial to the Nanjing Massacre, which commemorated the violence that had swept the city in 1937 and 1938. That winter, the invading Japanese army had occupied Nanjing, forcing the Kuomintang government to abandon the capital and flee to the interior. After the victory, Japanese soldiers ransacked the city, killing and raping civilians.

Six decades later, historians still argued about what had happened, and the death toll was a sensitive subject. Chinese scholars claimed that three hundred thousand died, although many foreign historians believed this statistic to be an exaggeration. In Japan, some right-wing groups denied that the massacre had taken place at all (and even relatively liberal Japanese history books preferred to call it an “incident”). For the Chinese, it remained one of the most sensitive wounds of the past, and they hated the idea of any outsider telling them what had or hadn’t happened.

The memorial featured signs in Chinese, English, and Japanese:

DON’T FORGET HISTORY

THE PAST KEPT IN MIND IS A GUIDE TO
THE FUTURE

Several enormous signs were wordless:

300,000

Inside the main memorial hall, glass cases displayed bones of victims. Another section featured black-and-white photographs—a monument to the soldier’s ability to document his own worst moments. Many Japanese troops had been stupid enough to take pictures and get the film developed at Shanghai
camera shops. Chinese technicians gave duplicates to foreign correspondents, which was one way that the outside world first received photographic evidence of the Nanjing Massacre.

I made my way through the silent hall of pictures. In one section, I found myself gazing at a three-photo series of a Chinese man getting beheaded—a kneeling figure, an upraised sword, a head rolling in the dust like a hairy ball—and then I realized that I couldn’t bear to do any more research in Nanjing.

I walked outside and sat in the open courtyard of the memorial. I wanted to leave Nanjing; it was a bad time to be in a strange city, and a travel article was the last thing I wanted to think about. But I dreaded the overnight train ride back to Beijing, with the inevitable angry conversations. I sat alone on a bench, trying to steel myself to walk back out into the city.

Across the courtyard, a flock of doves waddled in the sunshine. They were part of the memorial, and there was an employee who cared for the birds. The man had erected his own makeshift sign, the characters scrawled roughly across a sheet of plywood:

DO NOT PUSH, GRAB, SCARE, OR SHOUT
AT THE DOVES.

I walked over to read the sign, and the dove-keeper struck up a conversation. His name was Gong Bangxing, and he was sixty years old; he had accepted the museum job after retiring from a local glass factory. He earned a little more than eighty dollars a month. He liked to talk, and the only thing he wanted to talk about was doves. I had never been so thrilled to hear about birds.